When most people think of an art classroom, they usually think of cookie-cutter art projects, most likely pulled from Pinterest, where each students’ project looks just like the others because the teacher led students step-by-step through the process.  While these projects make nice, uniform bulletin board displays for the hallways, this type of art instruction offers very little true learning for students, and has few things in common with the way adult artists work.

    Art is a language.  Quite literally, our written language was constructed from drawings.  Artists have recorded history, created innovative solutions to problems, documented scientific and mathematical understanding.  Artists have created some of the most amazing architectural masterpieces, and have employed advanced engineering and technological concepts in their works.  These artists observed the world, and responded to their observations by creating.  We simply can’t study anatomy without learning about the early works of Michelangelo, and you won’t find an architect today who hasn’t studied Frank Lloyd Wright. So why, then, do we teach art in such a way that we remove our students from the creative dialogue?

    I draw my learning philosophy strongly from the Constructivists.  Like Dewey, I believe that students have the capacity for more than just rote memorization and recitation of information — that real learning comes from synthesizing and creating.  I also agree with Piaget’s theory that experience and context help students build on their understanding of concepts, and that their understanding will evolve over time.  And like Vygotsky, I also believe that social interaction between students, knowledgable mentors, and peers is vital to educational growth.  I believe that learning is an active process, and that the responsibility for learning lies with the learner, so I see myself as less of a traditional “teacher,” standing in front of the room and disseminating knowledge to the students, and more as an “guide,” providing my students with necessary tools, advice, and resources to take control of their entire learning experience.  But like Von Glasersfeld, I also believe that students must take responsibility for that which they construct with their learning, so constraint is appropriate in a constructivist setting.

    Art works well in a constructivist environment.  What is art but a constructed, visual representation of thought?  In a school setting, students can use art to show their understanding of everything from algebra to zoology, and as the facilitator of their artistic learning, I want to provide them with the best environment for creative growth.

    Ultimately, I believe that art students should be able to:

1.  Create. Follow-the-leader art projects rob students of their voice by choosing the subject matter, style, media, and media techniques for the students.  The resulting work may be aesthetically pleasing, but the student feels little ownership of it because they did not conceive it.  No wonder so many student art projects end up in the trash!
2.  Reflect. Artists spend a lot of time reflecting — on subject matter, on their work, on mistakes, on other artists’ work, and on how to use what they’ve learned to make new work.  Because elementary art time is cut so short, class time is typically prejudiced toward art creation and reflection time gets the boot.  This is so unfortunate, because reflection is what solidifies learning, and is so crucial in the process of creating art.  My classes will always have time and opportunities to reflect on their artwork through writing artists’ statements art critiques, and reflection pieces in their digital portfolios.
3. Choose.  Artists make a lot of choices, in every step of the artistic process.  Each artists’ voice or artistic style is the result of many choices made over years of practice by that artist.  When given an opportunity, artists who are barely old enough to hold a paintbrush begin to develop their own artistic style.  My students will never lose an opportunity to create using their own voice.
4.  Explore.  Artists spend a lot of time looking at the world around them.  Inspiration comes from everywhere!  Albrecht Durer found inspiration in a patch of grass.  Andy Warhol found inspiration in a soup can, of all things!  All artists find inspiration in other artists’ work.  So it is crucial that artists have opportunities to find inspiration and time to reflect on them.  My students will have access to technology for research, field trips to museums and public artworks, visits from guest artists, VR “field trips” to famous museums and architectural masterpieces, and plenty of books.  An artist needs a steady diet of new ideas, and the only way that I can provide that to almost 1000 students is by providing the resources and teaching them how to find inspiration on their own.
5. Be Safe. Safety means a lot of things in an art room.  We work with dangerous materials — sharp scissors, pointy pencils, things that spill, and things that irritate.  It is extremely important to keep our creative space safe.  Art is also dangerous to the psyche.  Sharing ideas can result in people saying things that aren’t nice, or in rejection, or (worse!) total silence.  When artists are met with hurtful reactions to their art, many stop taking artistic risks to create meaningful art, and start creating comfortable-yet-meaningless art.  In an educational setting, staying in one’s comfort zone means not learning very much.  So, for the sake of learning and quality art, it is very important to create a classroom culture that is safe, not only physically, but socially.  

    My constructivist art classroom may not look like a traditional art class.  It can get a little noisy, messy, and sometimes students may be doing things that in a traditional art classroom might look off-task.  And sometimes, my artists might make ugly art.  But because students are creating art in their own voice — art that is valuable to them and that they own — rest assured that the chaos is under control. The best art comes from students who are in control of their artistic process, and never from step-by-step, follow-the-leader art demonstrations.

 

 

Resources:

Harapnuik, D. (1998, November). Inquisitivism, or “The HHHMMM??? What Does This Button Do?” Approach to Learning.  WebNet 98 World Conference of the WWW, Internet and Intranet Proceedings, 55, 893-896.

While this paper deals mainly with adult learners, and I am writing more about the K-6 set, this article contains a helpful breakdown of some learning theories with more modern applications, and also a succinct description of Constructivism and Social constructivism.  

 

Hesser, J.F. (2009). Personal Perspectives on Constructivism in a High School Art Class. Art Education, 62(4), 41-47.

This article covers the constructivist learning theory quite well and also the role of the facilitator.  The author then goes on to describe a case study in which he applied a constructivist approach to teaching painting, and the results were more impressive due to more reflection, feedback from other students, and more opportunities for the teacher to identify teachable moments and step in to offer support.  The article is sort of like a diary of his experiences throughout this attempt at constructivism, and it’s interesting to see how it unfolded for him and his students.

 

Milbrandt, M.K., Felts, J., Richards, B., and Abghari, N. (2004, September). Teaching-To-Learn:  A Constructivist Approach to Shared Responsibility. Art Education. 57(5), 19-24, 23.

This article offers another good breakdown of the constructivist theory and explains why this learning theory works well in the art classroom.  Constructivist inquiry methods are often used by teachers who don’t necessarily identify with constructivism.  This article also offers a case study of teachers who attempted to try constructivism in their own classrooms.  The article ends with some helpful guidelines for employing constructivism in the art classroom.

 

Olsen, D. G. (2000). Constructivist Principles of Learning and Teaching Methods. Education. 120(2), 347-356.

This literature review covers a wide swath of ideas about constructivism in the classroom, and how it is best applied for successful learning.  It includes an interesting chart that tracks the principles of constructivism that various scholars identified in their works.  It is clear from this article that not all scholars agree on the effectiveness of constructivism, overall, but that most agree that there are merits to parts of the theory.

 

Oxford, R. L. (1997).  Constructivism:  Shape-Shifting, Substance, and Teacher Education Applications.  Peabody Journal of Education.  72(1), 35-66.

This critique argues that educators claiming to use the constructivist theory in their classrooms often do not understand it thoroughly, nor do they apply true constructivism in their classrooms.  The author argues that constructivism has experienced contradictory shifts over time and that modern use of the term “constructivism” is confusing because it has undergone so many iterations.  The author also argues that teacher education programs that teach constructivism often never break out of sit-and-get, test-driven, behaviorist methods, themselves, and so teachers don’t truly learn constructivism, much less how to apply it.

 

Prater, l.  (2001). Constructivism and Technology in Art Education.  Art Education. 54(6), 43-48.

Prater gives another concise breakdown of the major themes and movers of constructivism, and also discusses its use in the art room by giving examples of a more traditional art lesson and the same lesson in a constructivist art class.  Prater also combines technology in the mix, and though this portion of the article is dated, the ideas still apply to more modern technology available today.

 

Szekely, G.  (1983).  Preliminary Play in the Art Class.  Art Education.  36(6), 18-24.

Szekely’s article discusses the importance of play in the art class. His play-based art curriculum draws from Montessori-and Discovery Learning ideas about the importance of unstructured “play” in learning.  In this article, Szekely discusses how encouraging creative play brings about learning and understanding of sophisticated artistic concepts, along with other important skills students will take away from these experiences.

 

Von Glasersfeld, E.  (1990).  An Exposition of Constructivism:  Why Some Like it Radical. Retrieved from http://www.oikos.org/constructivism.htm

This article, like Windschitl’s, offers kind of a “yes, but” to the constructivist educational movement, in addition to a nicely-detailed history of constructivism and its evolution into the theories that make up constructivism today. The cautionary part of this article, though, is the concluding remarks, in which he uses the example of our understanding of the world and eventual destruction of much of it to illustrate that we don’t just need to teach people to learn and construct knowledge, but to be responsibility for what they construct from their knowledge.  
Windschitl, M.  (2002, Summer). Framing Constructivism in Practice as the Negotiation of Dilemmas:  An Analysis of the Conceptual, Pedagogical, Cultural, and Political Challenges Facing Teachers.  Review of Educational Research. 72(2), 131-175.

This article discusses the complexity of constructivism as a learning theory, and in the application of it in real schools in the current day.  This approach comes with some very real problems that could impede success of a constructivist learning model, but the discussion of those problems offers some great suggestions for making it work.